FROM BELFAST CELTIC TO A DUBLIN BARRICADE

When we think of sport
in the context of
revolutionary Ireland,
the Gaelic Athletic
Association – governing
body of Ireland’s national games
hurling and Gaelic football – comes
to mind instantly. Founded in 1884, the
organisation nailed its colours to the
mast in approaching nationalist leaders
Michael Davitt, Charles Stewart Parnell
and Archbishop Croke to serve as
honorary patrons of their new body.

Croke was anything but a voice of
moderation, once lamenting that the
Irish were daily importing from England
“her fashions, her accents, her vicious
literature, her music, her dances, her
mannerisms, her games and also her
pastimes, to the detriment of our own
grand national sports…. as though we
are ashamed of them.” No doubt, the
GAA often sought to align itself with
the nationalist revolutionary forces of
early twentieth century Ireland. In 1923,
it claimed brazenly that “in 1916, when
(Padraig) Pearse and his companions
unfurled the flag of liberty, the men
of the hurling and football fields
rolled in from far and near, and it is
no exaggeration to say they formed
the backbone of that company.”

Yet the truth is never so straightforward;
what of GAA men who fought in the
First World War, or ‘garrison game’
- football being associated with Irish
towns housing British army barracks
- aficionados in the ranks of the
Volunteers? Certainly, GAA athletes
formed a significant part of the
revolutionary forces of Easter Week 1916,
when a rebellion was staged against
British rule, and after, but there was
no monopoly when it came to sporting
allegiances. Proof of that could best be
found in Oscar Traynor, a 1916 participant
and later Commanding Officer of the
Dublin Brigade of the IRA. Born on
Dublin’s Upper Abbey Street in the heart
of the city in March 1886, Oscar was the
son of Patrick Traynor, a bookseller with
a Fenian history that influenced his son
and his political outlook. Traynor, an
obituary noted at the time of his passing
in 1963, played football as a young man
“for the simple reason that he liked it
best.” As a youth, he was goalkeeper
for Frankfort and Strandville in Dublin,
before taking to the same position for
Belfast Celtic in 1910.

Established in 1891, Belfast Celtic
was a club synonymous with the Falls
Road. Donald Taylor-Black, director
of a documentary about the club, has
noted that “they were obviously seen
as the archetypal representatives of the
Falls Road. They represented Catholicism
and nationalism, and the fact they played
in green was no accident - although the
team had no sectarian beliefs.” In many
ways, organised association football in
Ireland was dominated by Belfast in its
earliest years, both on and off the pitch.
Sectarian tensions in the city could spill
into the terraces; though after Traynor’s
time with the club, a particularly horrific
clash between Glentoran and Belfast
Celtic in 1919 has been described as
dissolving “into disorder complete with
rival flag-waving, anthem singing and
gunshots.” The club was ultimately
a victim of the tensions of life in the
fractured north, folding after a vicious
sectarian onslaught against them at
Windsor Park in the winter of 1948.
Traynor’s time there, between 1910 and
1912, was one of great success. The team
succeeded in winning the inaugural Gold
Cup and Charity Cup against Cliftonville,
and in the aftermath of this success
toured Europe in a series of exhibition
games, winning five of six clashes in the
city of Prague.

Were it not for the events of the
revolutionary period, perhaps
Traynor would have found his fame
as a footballer and not a politician.
In his statement to the Bureau of Military
History, he claims that it was in the
aftermath of the Howth gun running,
when rifles were delivered by boat to
the Irish Volunteers, and the Bachelors
Walk Massacre of innocent civilians
in July 1914 that he joined the Irish
Volunteer movement. Traynor told the
Bureau that he “was connected with
football up to that and I broke with
football when I saw that there was
something serious pending.”

Traynor’s account of the Easter Rising,
which he spent in the vicinity of
O’Connell Street, is thrilling. He describes
Padraig Pearse telling the rebels that
“if they did not do anything else, they
at least had redeemed the fair name
of Dublin city, which was dishonoured
when (nationalist leader) Robert Emmet
was allowed to die before a large crowd
of its people.” He also described the
great inferno that took hold of the street
on the Thursday, recalling that “I had
the extraordinary experience of seeing
the huge plate-glass windows of Clery’s
stores run molten into the channel from
the terrific heat.”

Traynor remained a significant figure
in the republican movement in the years
that followed. O/C of the Dublin Brigade
of the IRA, he was involved in the seizing
of buildings in the vicinity of O’Connell
Street during the Civil War, in an attempt
to provide support to the Anti-Treatyites
(those who opposed the recently-signed
treaty with Britain) who had occupied
the Four Courts. He was among those
to join Éamon de Valera’s Fianna Fáil
party in 1926, allowing a historic break
with the policy of abstentionism, and
putting republicans into the Dáil, the
Irish Parliament.

In 1928, Traynor reflected on the “crimes
of playing football” in an article for
Football Sports Weekly. His claim that
football should be viewed as a “Celtic
game, pure and simple, having its roots
in the Highlands of Scotland” may
be disputed by some historians of the
game. Yet his article also presented
a spirited defence of Irish association
football players, adamant that “some
of the highest executive officers of
the Republican movement, from 1916
onwards, played the despised foreign
games and I never heard any of them
apologising for doing so.” He evoked
the memory of Kevin Barry, the teenage
revolutionary hanged by the British in
1920, which historian Brian Hanley has
noted was “an astute move”, linking
one of the most revered figures of the
revolutionary period to foreign games.

Barry was a rugby and cricket player,
and the later sport was also played
by Traynor’s Civil War comrade Cathal
Brugha. Beyond Brugha and Barry, other
participants of the revolutionary period
with alignments to ‘garrison games’
include Michael Noyk, a Jewish Dublinborn
republican activist and solicitor who
was prominently involved in Shamrock
Rovers following independence. Todd
Andrews, active in the IRA throughout
the War of Independence and Civil War,
was another who chose association
football over Gaelic games. He would
joke of the frustrations of life as
an interned prisoner in the Curragh
in 1921, as the only code of football the
prisoners’ leadership allowed was not
to his choosing.

In post-revolutionary Ireland, there was
time for association football once more.
Though serving as Minister for Defence,
Traynor managed to also serve as
President of the Football Association
of Ireland from 1948. Before this, he
had utilised his government position
for the benefit of sporting liberties;
in 1942, he was responsible for amending
national army policy that afford the
GAA a privileged status. As historian
Barry Sheppard has detailed, this didn’t
enamour him to the GAA, with the
association’s President claiming
it to be a “retrograde step.” Four years
previously, Traynor had sat beside
President Douglas Hyde when he
attended an Ireland fixture in Dalymount
Park, something that led to Hyde’s
expulsion from the GAA’s list of patrons
as playing or attending non-Irish games
was deemed against their rules.
The language around the notorious
GAA ‘ban’ on foreign sports had, in
some ways, become more extreme
post-independence, as the sporting
authority sought to establish itself firmly
as the official sport of the new state.
A Vigilance Committee ensured that
members did not dabble in Anglophile
kickabouts, with a report on a 1930
disciplinary meeting bizarrely noting
that “One player admitted attending the
[association football] match in question,
but said he did so at the request of his
club, to see if other members or players
were present.”

It was in the capacity of FAI President
that Traynor defied the much-feared
Archbishop John Charles McQuaid in
1955, taking to the pitch of Dalymount
Park to welcome the Yugoslavian team
in a friendly against Ireland. Amidst
anti-communist hysteria, McQuaid had
attempted to discourage Dubliners from
attending this fixture (though more
than twenty thousand ignored him), and
commentator Philip Greene declined
to cover the match. Traynor refused to
be drawn into the Archbishop’s squalid
debate, stating afterwards that “we have
nothing to defend. Our actions have
been above board, friendly and will
continue so.”

Oscar Traynor died in December 1963,
at the age of 77. Less than three years
later, the Golden Jubilee of the Easter
Rising would see veterans of the Irish
Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers
parade on the pitch of Dalymount Park
before an FAI Cup Final. It was, to quote
one journalist, “a truly historic occasion….
which would have brought joy to the
heart of the late president of the FAI,
Oscar Traynor.”

Donal Fallon writes for Come Here To Me, a group blog that focuses on the life and culture of Dublin City. Music, history, football, politics and pubs all feature.